A few weeks later, I received a reply from the former Lost Media Society admin, the one who was said to be attempting to collect lost episodes. He told me he was not aware of an Aristocats lost episode version, but that he was nevertheless now in possession of several lost episode copies, and was willing to show them to me, for a price. To be exact, he wanted a thousand dollars. I agreed without hesitation. I was not at a point in my life where I could comfortably spend a thousand dollars on anything let alone a prospect that might not deliver, but I was afraid trying to talk him down to a lower offer would make him break contact, and something in my gut told me his claims at least were sincere.
He gave me the address of a secluded cabin he said he would rent for the purpose, which was several states away. He said to come alone, and gave me the exact date he expected me there. I was a little put off by his curt tone, but figured he was paranoid of someone stealing his collection, or worse, being hunted down by the people who made the items. I prepared for the trip and left immediately. When I arrived in the state where the cabin was, it was still a couple days until our meeting date, so I checked into a hotel.
I was up late, watching TV in my hotel room with the lights off, when I found a channel playing The Aristocats. It was in the middle of the movie, but I kept watching. I grew nervous. I had already watched the whole movie, and knew there was nothing unwholesome in the standard version. But the setting, alone in the dark with just the light of the TV, was strongly reminiscent of my traumatic virgin experience with the feature.
Soon though, my unease turned to comfort. I realized there was nothing to fear. Sure, at this point I was convinced that somewhere out there existed a violent and twisted version of The Aristocats, one which I had been unfortunate enough to somehow see as a child, but that didn’t matter. It couldn’t hurt me now. I laughed as I realized I now had the chance to relive the memory without the trauma. So I grabbed a snack and continued watching in the dark, for once able to enjoy the film as it was intended to be enjoyed. I was able to appreciate what a truly great movie it was, how much effort was put into the animation and voices, how great even the music was.
The soundtrack was a little distorted though. As I turned up the volume to hear it better I realized it wasn’t the TV. The music became faster and more distorted, and the scene began morphing into abstract images. I heard screams from the TV, and disturbing images too brief to make out clearly flashed on the screen.
This all ended with the still image of Berlioz, the one I found on the internet with his eyes bloodshot. On the image were two words in red caps:
STOP ASKING
The screen then went to black.
I sat in total darkness, my body quaking, tears and snot running down my face, hardly able to catch my breath.
I turned on the lights, threw up in the bathroom, and switched the channel. All the stations were playing normal television, which was somewhat comforting, but I still checked out of the hotel and went to a different one.
At this point I considered giving up the hunt. My first goal had been to find out if lost episodes were real, and I had certainly achieved at least that. Whether going further and finding out the exact nature and origin of them was worth it was becoming an increasingly dubious prospect. Whoever was behind them had powers and resources to seriously threaten me, and I didn’t know if full closure was worth risking my neck any further.
In the end I decided to keep going though. I was close now, and if there was some secret, powerful group behind all these lost episode stories, the world needed to know. Who were they, to try to intimidate me into giving up?
No, I wouldn’t give up the hunt. At that moment I doubled down in my determination. At the appointed time, I showed up at the cabin.
It was night, and the moon flooded the lonely cabin in an eerie glow. There was a vehicle in the driveway, but the lights were out and there were no other signs of occupancy.
I timidly went up and knocked on the door. Without turning on any lights, the man greeted me. For his own safety I will not describe the man save to say that he appeared middle-aged. “So, you were serious about this. Good. Do you have the money?”
I gave him the wallet of cash. He turned a lamp on and counted it out, then motioned for me to follow him to another room.
He closed the door behind him before turning on the light. The room had a high ceiling and nature paintings on the wall, along with a single shelf of old books that were clearly there for decoration. Centered on one of the walls was a large plasma television. There was a lot of space, but the man himself had only put a couple chairs and some plastic storage tubs on the floor.
“So, here’s my collection. It ain’t very big, but you’ll have a hard time finding these items anywhere else. Sorry to have to charge you so much, but you gotta realize I’m taking a huge risk by showing this stuff to a stranger, so you gotta make it worth my while.”
I trembled with anticipation. At last, I was about to have some real, concrete answers.
“Like I said in my email, I don’t have, nor have I previously heard of an Aristocats video made by these people, but from how you described it I completely believe you saw it. It fits right in with the kind of thing they would make,” he continued.
“By ’they’, you mean the Lost Media Group?” I interjected.
“Yeah. They would be behind the thing you saw, along with that Batman lost episode if it indeed exists, though I haven’t been able to find it myself, but again, wouldn’t be surprised. I don’t know what their goal is in making these things, but they’re interesting as hell so I collect them.”
I asked if he could share some of his contacts, but he flatly refused. “I only give that information to trusted friends, and even if you were one of them I would make you pay more than you could afford. Please don’t ask me that again. You’re lucky I even agreed to show you my collection.”
I was a little flustered by his tone, so I just nodded, then we got down to business. He opened one of the tubs and pulled out a VCR, along with a black VHS tape with a white label that read “Pink Panther” in black sharpie. He hooked up the VCR, inserted the tape, and played it.
It was a lost episode from the Pink Panther cartoon series, which was a show consisting of short sketches, about five or six minutes each, with the Pink Panther going on various solo adventures and getting into trouble with other characters and situations, which he manages with his superior mastery of cartoon physics. There is never any dialogue, save for the occasional wordless exclamation or babbled nonsense, like in the Tom and Jerry cartoons, and every short has the Pink Panther theme playing throughout. I had watched a little of the show as a kid, but didn’t have many memories of it.
This episode was called “40 Shades of Pink”, which I assumed was a pun on how Ireland is said to have “40 shades of green”, since this was a St. Patrick’s Day themed episode. It took place in a green land that, while not explicitly identified as Ireland, was obviously supposed to be the Emerald Isle or at least some generic insular Celtic fantasy land. The short involved the Pink Panther trying to steal a pot of gold from a leprechaun, or rather, the recurring “Little Man” character dressed as one. As the Pink Panther was walking over a rainbow like a bridge, a storm cloud caused it to disappear from under his feet. He fell, and there was a sickening crunching sound. The Pink Panther was shown bleeding out on the ground, bones jutting out. Then he saw the leprechaun’s pot and crawled over to it. Despite his injuries, a smile of victory crawled across his face. As he peered down into the pot, the leprechaun appeared from behind and pushed him in, closing a lid over him and then roasting him alive over a fire. The episode ended with the sound of the Pink Panther screaming.
Lame, I thought. Someone basically just took the Pink Panther cartoon and gave it the Itchy and Scratchy treatment. It was somewhat disturbing that whoever did it clearly had access to the original animation resources to make it look exactly like a real episode, but overall it was underwhelming compared to what I was expecting.
The next item was a copy of The Lion King. This time it was a proper factory copy with a retail jacket. The man told me the movie itself was normal, but there was a special animated short at the end of the tape with “psychedelic properties.” He warned me that the experience would be far more intense than the Pink Panther tape and even asked me if I had any heart conditions. Despite his warnings, I insisted on going through with it.
He refused to fast-forward to the short, saying he wanted to keep the tapes from warping even though he had the footage digitally archived. After the credits, there were some special features, including some animated shorts I had never seen before. When the title appeared for a short called “The Lion”, the man paused and asked once again if I was sure I wanted to proceed. I nodded, and he played it.
The short featured what was apparently a version of Scar, but the art style was completely different. It was a 2D animation, but somehow much more realistic than Pixar animation. It’s hard to explain, it wasn’t like CGI realism, but there was so much detail and effort put into the character that it gave the impression of realism while still being paradoxically fantastical.
The clip showed Scar walking around a white background before stopping to face the viewer. The “camera” began slowly zooming in on his face, and his eyes began glowing red. Threatening “jungle music” began playing.
Suddenly I became very nervous. A vicious grimace emerged on Scar’s face, the kind a predator makes before striking. His mouth opened wide, showing rows of sharp teeth, and I heard realistic growling sounds. His face wrinkled in a pattern consistent with the face a lion makes before pouncing.
My nervousness turned to terror. My gaze was transfixed on the screen, and I couldn’t look away. I knew it was only animated, and even if it wasn’t the lion couldn’t get to me through the screen, but I was paralyzed as if facing a real predator.
I was in a trance, one that didn’t break until Scar jumped and I screamed for my life. I kept screaming until the man shook me out of it. “Sorry about that,” he said “but I did warn you.”
Once I got my bearings back, I asked for the next item. He gave me a puzzled look, as if he had expected me to just give up and want to go home after the last tape, but he shrugged and got the next one. It was another home VHS tape labeled “Super Bowl 2000”.
“This next one won’t do anything to you like the lion video, but it’s disturbing in what it shows. In fact I’ll just tell you what it is: this tape shows a riot that didn’t happen. If you didn’t know, there was no sports riot at the 2000 Super Bowl, certainly not in the stadium itself. But the tape shows just that.”
Once again, the man refused to skip to the interesting part to preserve the integrity of the tape. In the third quarter, a referee made a call that didn’t sit well with Titans fans, and someone threw a beer bottle. More people started throwing things, and it escalated into a full-scale riot in which spectators swarmed the field and attacked each other. You could see the majority of the crowd slowly evacuating the venue while a small but determined segment began vandalizing the place and having sporadic brawls. There was no commentary at this point, just raw stadium footage that cycled through various venue cameras. About 20 minutes into the riot, the tape ended.
This tape did not cause me to experience abject terror like the last one, in fact the riot hadn’t even been that bad compared to other sports riots I’d seen, but I found it disturbing on a deeper level. The fact that they could alter a recording of a sports event to make it show something that so blatantly didn’t happen in reality terrified me. They could only have done it in one of two ways: with editing techniques that were well beyond what was publicly known to the world, or with some type of magic.
I still asked to see the next item. The man said it was the last one. It was a plug-and-play video game this time. The man explained that the Lost Media Group was known to dabble in other mediums besides movies and television, and that in particular they were said to produce a lot of “lost” video games, though this was the only one he had been able to acquire.
The game was labeled “Pokémon: Black Carbonite.” I actually remembered hearing about Nintendo making a Pokémon plug-and-play game that was cancelled, but I didn’t know if that was the title. The thing was black, and bore a white image of Pikachu, sporting a menacing grin.
“I’m not going to let you play this. I myself will never play it again. This thing will mess you up and is downright dangerous. You can examine the hardware though.”
I took it from him and did so. The first thing I noticed upon closer inspection was a fissure in the control pad. A lot of force had been applied to make the crack. Then I noticed that some of the plastic was warped… melted.
I looked at the man. He gave me a look back, a look of understanding that there was nothing more that needed to be said. I handed the game back to him.
The man said some goodbye formalities, put his hand over my shoulder, and aggressively led me to the door, closing and locking it behind me.
He never saw my camera. During the “Lion” short, I had managed to snap a quick digital photo of the TV screen while the man wasn’t looking, and had put the camera back away before the whole bad acid trip thing. I had the photo enlarged and enhanced and studied it. It was still frightening even without the psychedelic properties of the animated short. Again, despite being a cartoon, it had such detail and realism that it seemed more alive than I thought a cartoon could.